ABSTRACT
Even though the Polish people repeatedly showed their resentment toward the communist regime in their country, only the strike of August 1980 at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk forced the leading party to agree to the foundation of the first independent trade union. In this chapter, Berenika Szymanski-Düll investigates how the strikers succeeded in finding a public sphere for their concerns. In doing so, she focuses on the theatrical dimension of the Gdańsk strike, which Szymanski-Düll considers to be one of the constitutive strategies, and she shows how this, at first, local public sphere expanded nationally and transnationally.
